One big assumption we're all making is that the relative size of bleeds to direct damage will stay the same.

I think everybody posting here realizes anything could happen. Personally I feel it will be very difficult to make Feral compelling gameplay without a complete overhaul due to the removal of snapshotting. I agree we are putting the cart before the horse discussing secondary stats without even having a clue what the core gameplay will be like. However since no clues are forthcoming we can only discuss the stats we know about.

On topic(about snapshots): I think blizz did not balance things with so much snapshots in their mind. Thus you see feral and aff top meters. Meanwhile blizz considered these two classes as middle of the pack. Thus blizz are going to remove snapshot.

On topic(about snapshots): I think blizz did not balance things with so much snapshots in their mind. Thus you see feral and aff top meters. Meanwhile blizz considered these two classes as middle of the pack. Thus blizz are going to remove snapshot.

Snapshotting is pretty balanced though, the only extreme outlier was Demo locks with the Lei Shen trinket. Sure feral is great and snapshotting is a big part of that, but there isn't a single fight in SoO (aside from immerseus which hardly counts)that feral is not beat by rogues, a class which does not use snapshotting of dots.

Snapshotting has definitely been a concern for blizzard when it comes to balance, In 5.2 they changed they way bleeds work so that they snapshot crit chance rather than updating dynamically that they had been, the same goes for any dots that were updating crit dynamically. Overall I thin snapshotting is fine and I'm sad to see it go, mainly because a lot of feral planning/thought process this expansion has revolved around being ready for trinket procs so that you can re-apply bleeds.

Originally Posted by teddabear

I think everybody posting here realizes anything could happen. Personally I feel it will be very difficult to make Feral compelling gameplay without a complete overhaul due to the removal of snapshotting.

Seconded, my main hype for Beta is to see what feral is going to be like, I'm worried that without snapshotting feral will be pretty boring for me, unless they shorten our bleeds or change a few things drastically. Without snapshotting you never really need to be on your toes ready for a trinket proc like you do now

This entire secondary stat discussion would be a lot simpler if we simply considered changing our mastery so that it gets replaced something that has nothing to do with bleeds only OR increases our entire damage OR increases the dmg% increase of savage roar (sorry, been playing too much monk). The entire discussion is essentially an extrapolation of the core issue that our main damage cooldown and our mastery have nothing to do with one another, as has been pointed out earlier in the post.

This entire secondary stat discussion would be a lot simpler if we simply considered changing our mastery so that it gets replaced something that has nothing to do with bleeds only OR increases our entire damage OR increases the dmg% increase of savage roar (sorry, been playing too much monk). The entire discussion is essentially an extrapolation of the core issue that our main damage cooldown and our mastery have nothing to do with one another, as has been pointed out earlier in the post.

Excellent point but I would add FB hitting like a wet noodle is also a big issue. With the removal of snapshotting it will be an even bigger issue. Now that Blizzard has conceded they can't balance the game for both PvP and PvE with the same mechanics it's time for separate versions of FB and the PvE version needs to be similar in damage to Rip.

The FB issue may be solved already, Celestalon did say they buffed the damage of a single ability by 100% and there's very few spells that he could be referring to aside from FB (maim, pounce?).

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Originally Posted by Alpheus

This entire secondary stat discussion would be a lot simpler if we simply considered changing our mastery so that it gets replaced something that has nothing to do with bleeds only OR increases our entire damage OR increases the dmg% increase of savage roar (sorry, been playing too much monk). The entire discussion is essentially an extrapolation of the core issue that our main damage cooldown and our mastery have nothing to do with one another, as has been pointed out earlier in the post.

I've talked about this before, but under this sort of scheme, bleeds start to turn from periodic damage effects into debuffs that you just need to have up on your targets to do proper damage (think subtlety rogue). This is terrible for versatility. You lose the advantages of having powerful periodic damage effects -- namely, multiple-target damage and ability to maintain damage during downtimes -- without gaining any of the advantages of a direct damage-reliant class, like reduced ramp-up time on target switch.

I did toy around with it a little in simulationcraft and it turns out the coefficient would have to be absurdly high (like, reaaaaaalllly, really really absurdly high) for it to be competitive, so you're definitely right.

Although I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea of a mastery that is targeted at increasing bleed damage that synergizes with haste but doesn't significantly decrease off target damage or multi-DoTting potential.

Doubling FB damage sounds like they are just going back to a LK version of maximizing Ferocious Bites. Does that even equal LK damage without ArP? I don't see how DoC exists in such a scenario. Hopefully they will give us a little more information soon.

My personal wishlist for Feral (please, don't bash me, it's just my opinion )
- Shapeshifting have their own GCD.
- Remove or totally overhaul of Savage Roar, no more "keep-up 100% of the time" buffs for any class, please. Moar Ferocious Bites!
- Hunters' Lynx Rush talent as a finisher instead of Maim or Savage Roar. It'd be so nice for cleave situations.
- They could just give us Bash with a shorter CD and remove Maim.
- Mastery reworked. I find it boring, it's just and old pre-cataclysm talent that adds damage, plus I find it wrong that 1 or 2 ticks of Rip are stronger than a single Ferocious Bite.
- Shred > Mangle (because of Mangle sound mostly, which I find annoying).
- Pounce usable and interesting to use in the rotation, I like its jumping animation, so we see some different animation from time to time.
- Prowl with 1 min CD in combat and 10 secs ooc. It's not vanish, it wouldn't reset aggro nor remove effects, but it adds some gameplay...
- A passive called Ravage that causes some abilities to do something more while Prowling: Pounce stuns, Shred adds damage and critical strike chance, Rake could tick more times... Just throwing some ideas to make prowling more interesting.
- Thrash and Swipe merged up. They're just the same ability but one adds a bleeding effect.
- Stampeding Roar and Dash merged. Shorter CD because of the loss of one of them, and the druid gets more speed than allies, so we keep our speed and utility.
- Some armor pieces shown while shapeshifted. I know they've tried to implement that and didn't work, but I still want it. Head, Shoulders, Waist and Hands would be enough imo. Glyph for those who don't want this, or viceversa.
- Regrowth instead of Healing Touch.
- Nurturing Instinct as a real Agi to Int conversion. I want my from time to time Moonfire to deal some actual damage.
- This won't happen but: combo points on the druid not on the target.
- Thorns back somehow, as a talent or baked with Barkskin or something. I loved its Cataclysm implementation.

Compared to...what? Feral has bad cleave; Rake spreading leaves you starved of energy with no CPs to perform a single-target rotation, while the damage of Thrash doesn't compare to the cleave offered by other classes. It's the price we pay for being the highest single-target DPS at the moment.

Compared to...what? Feral has bad cleave; Rake spreading leaves you starved of energy with no CPs to perform a single-target rotation, while the damage of Thrash doesn't compare to the cleave offered by other classes. It's the price we pay for being the highest single-target DPS at the moment.

Our cleaves have been in place since late-cata but we've only just been top dps on the last tier of MoP. Definitely not by design.

No, Feral cleave is terrible irregardless of which classes might be too high.

Let's put it a better way.

Our cleave over time on mobs lasting more then 8 seconds is pretty solid. We can continue our single target rotation with out interruption.
Our burst cleave can be very powerful provided we have Berserk/TF up. Mobs die fast and we can funnel the remaining Berserk time into single target.
Outside of Berserk our burst is a bit more limited. However it's still very possible to get a Thrash and 2 swipes in a very rapid time frame with just TF.

It's not that bad. Sustained AOE (which is not cleave) we are pretty weak outside of 15 seconds of Berserk every 3 minutes (or less with AoC).